Culture

A letter from the editor

The Outline has been sold to Bustle Digital Group. What does this mean?
Culture

A letter from the editor

The Outline has been sold to Bustle Digital Group. What does this mean?

Last week it was announced that The Outline was acquired by Bustle Digital Group, the parent organization of sites like Bustle, Elite Daily, and New Gawker. This is very good news if you like or even like to hate The Outline, because it means The Outline will continue to exist.

Many people have asked me if The Outline will change what it is doing now that it is owned by Bustle Digital Group. The short answer to this question is… no!!! The site will have the same staff, cover the same topics, and feature the same writers. The site will also look the same. The squiggly lines are not going anywhere and we will never apologize for them. The extended answer to this question is actually yes, we might change a little in that we will be able to expand our staff, pay more people to write more stories for us, and reinvest in longform and audio projects, all of which we are very excited about.

The Outline was founded in 2016 as a reprieve from formulaic news sites, a place where one could read a smart essay, idiosyncratic investigation, or simply take a break from the churn of the current popular news cycle. Mostly, our mission was to publish only things we really wanted to publish, not to play the Sisyphean game of writing content around trending topics or Google keywords. This mandate has allowed us, in my opinion, to be very weird, interesting, thoughtful, and most importantly, distinctly ourselves. How so, you ask? Let’s reflect on some things we have examined:

The magical thinking of guys who love logic

The booming business of luxury chicken diapers

Bad Tech

Quite messy

Notes on dyke camp

Hail Xenu

Why do we all have balls on our hats?

My dad painted the iconic cover for Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung,’ and it’s haunted him ever since

TRASH DENIED

Dear Fuck-Up: Should I apologize to the women I hurt?

All hail the monumental horror-image

How striking scenes from ‘The Shining,’ ‘The Wicker Man,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ and other iconic horror movies make an indelible mark on us.

Diet Coke is not killing you

So I hope you’ll stay with us on this strange media journey, and we look forward to remaining the same, but maybe even better. And if you have any questions, complaints, or compliments, I’m always available at leah@theoutline.com.

Thank you for reading,
Leah

Leah Finnegan is the executive editor of The Outline.